Something more than a tremendous picture of the Confederate Army was to be left here, Gutzon decided. He needed a studio in this area; so he would build one at the foot of the mountain—a huge one made of permanent materials. And when the project was finished this building could be converted into a vast art school of a sort much needed in the South. The students, he declared, would be able to learn about sculpture by looking at it, by being a part of a great work as they did in medieval Italy.
He designed a great hall to be cut into the rock below the marching statues. This was to be a memorial to the women of the South and a depository for their records. In addition to that he was planning an open-air amphitheater at the base of the mountain. He gave this some tests. Marie Tiffany of the Metropolitan Opera Company came down to sing for a select few and demonstrated the perfect acoustics of the place. This will be a shrine to gladden the soul, said Gutzon. And it looked as if it might be.
For a year the sculptor was forced to commute between Stamford and Atlanta. But with Tucker looking after the work on the cliff it began to progress. Sam Venable and Forrest Adair took up the assignment of raising more money.
Borglum decided to scaffold the entire area necessary for blocking and carving the central group, nearly an acre of perpendicular granite wall. This arrangement would have a higher initial cost but would make it easier and quicker to work the rock. An entirely new approach to the project was built from below, 700 feet of steps up to a solid platform. The platform was hung on the mountainside 550 feet above the base, and on it were the blacksmith shops, drill-sharpening apparatus, hoists, power plants, supply rooms and machine shops. Air compressors were installed with air lines and feeders 1,700 feet from the base. A cable hoist was erected and the mountain electrified.
The cost of bringing electricity to the mountain was estimated by the Georgia Power Company at $15,000, but it never came to that. Preston Arkright, president of the company, was interested in Gutzon’s plan to carve a mountain. He reduced the bill eighty per cent and presently canceled it altogether.
Once the way was provided for the men to get to their working stations, Gutzon faced the problem of getting something arranged for them to work on. He had next to place his design on the great wall of rock in exactly the right place and proper proportion to the scale of the mountain. The size of the figures was so great and the surface of the wall such that the ordinary scale model which sculptors use was not satisfactory. It was absolutely impossible to get any sense of correct proportion from a steel cage let down over the face of the mountain on cables.
Large drawings were hung over the cliff without success. Then Gutzon began experimenting with a lamp projector which could throw photographs of his models on the mountain face. Up to that time the largest projection machine had a range of only 300 feet. The manufacturers of such machines, whom Gutzon consulted, declared that a lamp powerful enough to project a picture 800 feet would produce such intense heat that the lens would be broken and the slide melted.
Finally Gutzon went to E. S. Porter of the Precision Machine Company of New York who promised to build a projector according to his requirements. After months of experiment the lamp was ready for trying out on the photographic slides of Lee and his generals taken from Gutzon’s sketches. The test was made in Stamford; the lamp placed on a terrace near the house and the biggest sheets he could find stretched across the meadow several hundred feet away. The Connecticut Power Company ran the electricity through a special wire.
While the sculptor was fussing with the slide to get the proper focus, his little girl began jumping up and down and pointing her little finger. She exclaimed: “Oh, Daddy, look! Horses riding through the field.” And sure enough! There were horses carrying Generals Lee and Jackson riding like ghosts upon the slightly misty atmosphere, far ahead of the sheets hung there to catch them.
The lamp was taken down to Stone Mountain where another difficulty was encountered. The carving was at an elevation of 350 feet. That meant that the light beam carrying the design traveled upward at an angle of a little more than fifty degrees, which meant great distortion. The sculptor discovered that by tipping the slide at a corresponding angle, this distortion could be overcome.